The railroad is bound to take the place of the Indian trail; the miners' cabin must supplant the Indian wigwam. Great cities will rise near where ancient villages stood, but the savage fails to appreciate the thought or the character of the people who have supplanted him. The wigwam amid the mountains is a symbol of what he is, but the locomotive at its side is an emblem of progress and of promise to those who will use their opportunities. The mountains are in the background—they suggest the possibilities which are before the settler. They interpose barriers, but the barriers themselves are fraught with good influences. Freedom has always dwelt among the mountains. Reverence for the Almighty has also prevailed. The leveling process must cease and man become more elevated in his thoughts as he rises to the altitude of these great heights.—The American Antiquarian.
A NOVEL WAY OF RIDING A BICYCLE.
"Artists" of the variety stage and the circus are always trying to find something new, for the same old trapeze performances, trials of strength, performances of rope dancers, etc., have been presented so many times that anyone who invents an entirely new trick is sure of making a large amount of money out of it; the more wild and dangerous it is, the better. Anything that naturally stands on its feet but can be made to stand on its head will be well received in the latter attitude by the public. Some such thought as this must have been in the mind of the man who conceived the idea of riding a bicycle on the ceiling instead of on the floor. The "trick" originated with the Swiss acrobat Di Batta, who, being too old to undertake such a performance himself, trained two of his pupils to do it, and they appeared with their wheel in Busch Circus in Berlin. The wheel, of course, ran on a track from which it was suspended in such a way that it could not fall, and the man who operated it used the handle bar as he would the cross bar of the trapeze. One would think that the position of the rider was sufficiently dangerous to satisfy any public, but the inventor of the trick sought to make it appear more wonderful by having the rider carry between his teeth a little trapeze from the crosspiece of which another man hung.
Different colored lights were thrown on the performers as they rode around the ceiling, and at the end of the performance first one and then the other dropped into the safety net which had been placed about sixty feet below them. We are indebted to the Illustrirte Zeitung for the cut and article.
REQUIREMENTS OF PALESTINE EXPLORER.
Lieut.-Col. Conder says that the requirements for exploration demand a knowledge not only of Syrian antiquities, but of those of neighboring nations. It is necessary to understand the scripts and languages in use, and to study the original records as well as the art and architecture of various ages and countries. Much of our information is derived from Egyptian and Assyrian records of conquest, as well as from the monuments of Palestine itself. As regards scripts, the earliest alphabetical texts date only from about 900 B. C., but previous to this period we have to deal with the cuneiform, the Egyptian, the Hittite and the Cypriote characters.
The explorer must know the history of the cuneiform from 2700 B. C. down to the Greek and Roman age, and the changes which occurred in the forms of some 550 characters originally hieroglyphics, but finally reduced to a rude alphabet by the Persians, and used not only in Babylonia and Assyria, but also as early as 1500 B. C. in Asia Minor, Syria, Armenia, Palestine and even by special scribes in Egypt. He should also be able to read the various Egyptian scripts—the 400 hieroglyphics of the monuments, the hieratic, or running hand of the papyri, and the later demotic.